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What's a good alternative you would suggest? I often have a similar problem and the fact is that most users hang out on platforms that suck like Twitter, Faceb

by modsec 8y ago

What's a good alternative you would suggest? I often have a similar problem and the fact is that most users hang out on platforms that suck like Twitter, Facebook, etc. If I build my business on a decentralized platform like blockchain etc. I immediately lose 90% or even more of my target audience. If I build my business on my own datacenter the cost and maintenance involved is staggeringly high. Do you have a reasonable alternative that would allow small players like us to host large volumes of data (say about 1 TB to 2 TB) while completely controlling the ownership of the data?

twblalock 8y ago
Use cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure. Or pay to be colocated in a datacenter -- you don't need to build one. Back up your databases somewhere that only you control. You'll have to hire some engineers to maintain this, but it won't be as bad as building a datacenter. And it's what you'll need to do to avoid being a sharecropper on someone else's platform.
- pjc50 8y ago
  > You'll have to hire some engineers to maintain this That rules out small projects and requires monetization.
iuguy 8y ago
They had, in their own words hundreds of followers. At the time of this comment, the fediverse has about 1.2 million accounts. It's not that hard to get hundreds of followers there.
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  Twitter has hundreds of times more accounts. It depends on the audience, everyone's mileage may vary, so on and so forth, but as a general rule of thumb, if you're drawing from a pool that's 300x bigger, it's going to be easier to get orders of magnitude more followers. This is not Mastodon's fault; network effects are what they are. Having said that, anecdotally I find it very hard to get people outside of a relatively narrow demographic to get on board with it. More than one fairly technically literate friend of mine has stopped about at the point where they're confronted with the choice of what instance to create an account on, especially if they choose and then get told "no, that instance is full, go create one somewhere else." It's not clear that the instance, at least theoretically, doesn't matter. Note I say "theoretically," because it turns out it can matter. If the instance you choose is maintained poorly, your experience may be worse. (This is in fact my experience.) And it's not clear how to migrate between instances while keeping your social graph intact. Mastodon has a long way to go in terms of user experience to be accessible to people who aren't dedicated enough to the idea of a decentralized Twitter alternative to put up with this stuff. Last but not least: it's hard for me not to notice that in the year or so I've had a Mastodon account, it's been very hard for me to discover people to follow, especially after the occasional burst of new users dies down. The people I followed are, except for two or three folks who are clearly dedicated to it over Twitter for philosophical reasons, mostly...just not using it now. (Of the two dozen people I followed, my timeline is now pretty much just content from two users, one of who is only "there" because his blog crossposts automatically.) You know where most of them are still active? Twitter. tl;dr: it might be great for a project like OpenBench to also be on Mastodon, but not exclusively be on it.
  - iuguy 8y ago
    So to break things down as I think we're partially of the same view: 1. To start with the end, nobody's suggesting they're exclusively on Mastodon (which is not the only Fediverse tool, there are others), and they absolutely should syndicate far and wide. However, posting to Mastodon/Pleroma/Whatever first and syndicating the content elsewhere means that if this happens again, they don't lose tweets. 2. Drawing from a pool 300x bigger doesn't make for 300x better interactions. Generally Fediverse SNR seems to be better, but this is more or less so depending upon interest and representation. Bear in mind OP's twitter account had followers in the hundreds, like my Mastodon account does. I have thousands on twitter, but I only interact with maybe 50-100 people there. 3. WRT your friend, there's now https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/, which will guide them to an instance. Your friend is not required to use Mastodon to participate in the Fediverse. There are other tools out there. They're all linked (you can use Pleroma and read Mastodon toots for example). The whole point of the fediverse is that it isn't a walled garden and that you own your content. 4. There are tools to assist with migrating Mastodon accounts but they're early stage. I agree this sucks, but in it's defence it's because Mastodon is new and expanding and the tools are improving. 5. This was the bit I wanted to talk about: > it's been very hard for me to discover people to follow Yup. I completely agree. The solution however is right under your nose. The way to find people to follow in the Fediverse is: 1. Search for hashtags you're interested in. 2. Find people using those hashtags and check out their feeds. 3. Look at who they follow and check those people out. This is how every social network pretty much used to work, and fundamentally is down to the fact that in the fediverse you own your presence, your data and your network which means you are responsible for it. There's nobody pushing for engagement, nobody making money from filling your feed with ads. The price is personal responsibility. If you think that's too high a price to pay, that's fine. Stay in the walled garden with curated content and risk having all the content you produced for corporations for free so they could sell ads to be pushed to you and your friends erased at the drop of a hat without explanation. And you can say it'll never work, it'll never replace twitter or facebook. But HN will never replace Reddit and Lobsters will never replace HN, yet both are doing pretty well for the communities they serve. Once you bend your head around the concept that fediverse communities as a whole have no interest in replicating Twitter or Facebook it starts to make a lot more sense.

by modsec 8y ago

twblalock 8y ago

Use cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure. Or pay to be colocated in a datacenter -- you don't need to build one. Back up your databases somewhere that only you control. You'll have to hire some engineers to maintain this, but it won't be as bad as building a datacenter. And it's what you'll need to do to avoid being a sharecropper on someone else's platform.

pjc50 8y ago
> You'll have to hire some engineers to maintain this That rules out small projects and requires monetization.

iuguy 8y ago

They had, in their own words hundreds of followers. At the time of this comment, the fediverse has about 1.2 million accounts. It's not that hard to get hundreds of followers there.

chipotle_coyote 8y ago
Twitter has hundreds of times more accounts. It depends on the audience, everyone's mileage may vary, so on and so forth, but as a general rule of thumb, if you're drawing from a pool that's 300x bigger, it's going to be easier to get orders of magnitude more followers. This is not Mastodon's fault; network effects are what they are. Having said that, anecdotally I find it very hard to get people outside of a relatively narrow demographic to get on board with it. More than one fairly technically literate friend of mine has stopped about at the point where they're confronted with the choice of what instance to create an account on, especially if they choose and then get told "no, that instance is full, go create one somewhere else." It's not clear that the instance, at least theoretically, doesn't matter. Note I say "theoretically," because it turns out it can matter. If the instance you choose is maintained poorly, your experience may be worse. (This is in fact my experience.) And it's not clear how to migrate between instances while keeping your social graph intact. Mastodon has a long way to go in terms of user experience to be accessible to people who aren't dedicated enough to the idea of a decentralized Twitter alternative to put up with this stuff. Last but not least: it's hard for me not to notice that in the year or so I've had a Mastodon account, it's been very hard for me to discover people to follow, especially after the occasional burst of new users dies down. The people I followed are, except for two or three folks who are clearly dedicated to it over Twitter for philosophical reasons, mostly...just not using it now. (Of the two dozen people I followed, my timeline is now pretty much just content from two users, one of who is only "there" because his blog crossposts automatically.) You know where most of them are still active? Twitter. tl;dr: it might be great for a project like OpenBench to also be on Mastodon, but not exclusively be on it.
- iuguy 8y ago
  So to break things down as I think we're partially of the same view: 1. To start with the end, nobody's suggesting they're exclusively on Mastodon (which is not the only Fediverse tool, there are others), and they absolutely should syndicate far and wide. However, posting to Mastodon/Pleroma/Whatever first and syndicating the content elsewhere means that if this happens again, they don't lose tweets. 2. Drawing from a pool 300x bigger doesn't make for 300x better interactions. Generally Fediverse SNR seems to be better, but this is more or less so depending upon interest and representation. Bear in mind OP's twitter account had followers in the hundreds, like my Mastodon account does. I have thousands on twitter, but I only interact with maybe 50-100 people there. 3. WRT your friend, there's now https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/, which will guide them to an instance. Your friend is not required to use Mastodon to participate in the Fediverse. There are other tools out there. They're all linked (you can use Pleroma and read Mastodon toots for example). The whole point of the fediverse is that it isn't a walled garden and that you own your content. 4. There are tools to assist with migrating Mastodon accounts but they're early stage. I agree this sucks, but in it's defence it's because Mastodon is new and expanding and the tools are improving. 5. This was the bit I wanted to talk about: > it's been very hard for me to discover people to follow Yup. I completely agree. The solution however is right under your nose. The way to find people to follow in the Fediverse is: 1. Search for hashtags you're interested in. 2. Find people using those hashtags and check out their feeds. 3. Look at who they follow and check those people out. This is how every social network pretty much used to work, and fundamentally is down to the fact that in the fediverse you own your presence, your data and your network which means you are responsible for it. There's nobody pushing for engagement, nobody making money from filling your feed with ads. The price is personal responsibility. If you think that's too high a price to pay, that's fine. Stay in the walled garden with curated content and risk having all the content you produced for corporations for free so they could sell ads to be pushed to you and your friends erased at the drop of a hat without explanation. And you can say it'll never work, it'll never replace twitter or facebook. But HN will never replace Reddit and Lobsters will never replace HN, yet both are doing pretty well for the communities they serve. Once you bend your head around the concept that fediverse communities as a whole have no interest in replicating Twitter or Facebook it starts to make a lot more sense.